Start with a handful of restless teenage girls in a small Georgia town.
Add a splash of Salem witch trials and a hefty dose of #MeToo. Mix it all together with an infectious dance sequence, and what do you get?
Answer: Seven Tony Award nominations for a play written by Emory playwright Kimberly Belflower, assistant professor of dramatic writing in the theater studies and creative writing programs.
Just weeks into an acclaimed Broadway run, Belflower’s “John Proctor is the Villain” is nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.
In Tony nominations announced May 1, the play also received nods for Best Direction of a Play, for Dayna Taymor; Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, for Sadie Sink; Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play, for Gabriel Ebert; and Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play, for Fina Strazza.
Rounding out the Tony nominations for “John Proctor” are Best Sound Design of a Play, for Palmer Hefferan, and Best Lighting Design of a Play, for Natasha Katz and Hannah Wasileski.
"I grew up in a small town in rural Appalachian Georgia; as a teenager, and for a long time after, I felt like I needed to shed my Southern-ness to be taken seriously as an artist,” Belflower told People magazine. “For 'John Proctor is the Villain,' a play about Southern teenage girls, to be nominated for seven Tony awards is so special I can hardly believe it.”
She has previously described “John Proctor” as a play that “came from my guts and my home and has been held by so many people on its journey.”
The Tony Awards recognize excellence in live theater in 26 categories. Best Play winners through the years include “Death of a Salesman,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Angels in America.”
This year’s Tony winners will be announced on Sunday, June 8.
If Belflower’s play wins a Tony, she’ll join Emory alumnus Jonathan Demar in the Tony Award pantheon. Demar, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music in 2013, has earned four Tonys for Broadway plays he’s co-produced.
He also co-produced “John Proctor is the Villain.”
Demar said he’s excited that Belflower’s play is “getting the recognition it deserves.”
“The play is hitting a zeitgeist that rarely we see Broadway hit,” he said, “and I'm thrilled to be associated with something that happens to be written by someone who teaches at Emory.”
‘An urgent new play’
Since its April 14 debut at the Booth Theatre, ”John Proctor is the Villain” has garnered no small amount of social media buzz as well as critical acclaim. A review by the New York Times called it “an urgent new play about a group of students battling for the right to be the narrators of their own lives.”
The play has also received four Drama Desk Award nominations, including Outstanding Direction of a Play, for Taymor; Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play, for Amalia Yoo; and Outstanding Lighting Design of a Play, for Katz.
Set in 2018, the work follows a group of high-school girls assigned to read “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller. The situation escalates when they start to notice connections among events in their own lives and the burgeoning #MeToo movement, as well as the Salem witch trials described in Miller’s play.
Belflower wrote “John Proctor is a Villian” after reading about the witch trials, just before the explosion of accusations of sexual harassment and assault that became the #MeToo movement.
Before its Broadway premiere, “John Proctor” enjoyed critically lauded runs at Studio Theater in Washington, D.C., and Huntington Theatre in Boston.
Belflower’s previous plays include “Gondal,” “Lost Girl” (winner of the Kennedy Center Darrell Ayers Playwriting Award), “The Sky Game” and “Only Reason” (formerly titled “Teen Girl FANtasies” and co-written by Megan Tabaque). Her work has been commissioned, produced and developed by theaters around the country.